In a Disused Graveyard
by ShadowRogue75
Summary: Sasuke's gone. All Sakura has left are fading memories until she discovers a way to be of use to him.
1. Chapter 1

It would be easy to be clever

And tell the stones: Men hate to die

And have stopped dying now forever.

I think they would believe the lie.

--from Robert Frost's In a Disused Graveyard

The cold dawn light crawled up the stony outcrop where the modified Team 7 had camped. Sakura, always an early riser, sat facing the rising sun with her legs dangling off the crag. They were heading back to Konoha today; her favourite part of a mission, but not for reasons that others could guess at.

**

Team 7 usually started out walking side-by-side when returning home from a mission. Then Naruto, of course, would inexplicably walk too quickly and soon would be far in the distance. Kakashi, continually absorbed in _Make-Out Paradise_, kept his own pace and with his longer stride inevitably got ahead of them too. By circumstance then, Sakura was left to walk beside Sasuke. So they walked; together in silence. In the stillness between them she thought she could sense his being. Sometimes, Sakura could feel him looking at her even if, from the corner of her eye, it appeared that he wasn't. Almost like he was keeping an eye on her; keeping her within arm's reach. As if he was ready to reach out to her. She wanted to be there when he did.

Many times she wondered if she was making something out of nothing and Sasuke was just minding his own business on the way back to Konoha. But that's not what she felt. Especially because it was the same feeling washed over her in the morning during missions when she first awoke and extended a silent greeting toward the horizon of the morning sun. The notion that perhaps he was watching her was a pleasure that warmed and brought colour to the day which followed.

Back in Konoha, after Naruto's necessary ramen, Kakashi would mysteriously disappear when it came time to pay (that it still came as a surprise to his subordinates was a credit to Kakashi's ninja skills). The rest of Team 7 left together. As Naruto's apartment was the closest to Ichiraku, he would depart first, full of ideas for training. From there, Sakura's house and Sasuke's apartment lay in the same direction so they were again walking alongside each other. Her house appeared all too soon and she would come to a reluctant halt outside it to look at him. Sasuke never said goodbye first. Sakura was loath to say it and sever their rapport; but she could feel the moment dying and would say it to say something, anything to him lest he walk away without saying anything at all. Early on, Sakura tried to convince Sasuke to hang out with her or even train with her but he always refused; and she cursed the flight of her clever mind as it failed to produce the right combination of words to convince him. Later, she came to savour the dying moment; its sweet ephemerality something they could share. She would look him straight in the eye to say goodbye; loading the one word with the ghosts of all the others she dare not utter.

Returning from her first mission after Sasuke left Konoha, Sakura made her way home, her melancholy blotting out the bustling village. Her house appeared all too soon. A quiet desperation grasped her core. Sasuke. The moment of goodbye had stopped dying forever – it was dead. She shook her head and walked on….Until she was at the fringe of Konoha where the Uchiha clan had lived…and died. A veritable ghost village, she knew of no one who had gone there since the mass funeral (the village elders had thought it best to bury the Uchihas on their own land). . .she too had not gone since then, not even to see the graves. Sakura decided to pay her respects.

To her dismay and confusion, the site she came upon had fallen into disuse. Only after checking a few of the tombstones could she convince herself that this was the right location. The graves by the Will of Fire statue were always immaculate, tended daily; that was not the case here as leaves blew onto the stones and the fading grass was pockmarked with weeds. Yet, it wasn't as if the graves had been forgotten for years, just weeks. . . which made her think of how just weeks before Team 7 had been complete. She paused. If it had been several weeks since he left, Sasuke must have been tending them by himself. At once, Sakura knew why he had always refused her entreaties. She fell to the task; a task she now always did upon arriving back in the Village because she could not say goodbye.

**

Sakura heard Kakashi rustling behind her as his fit the last few things into his pack; it was time to go.

**

Ennui permeated Team Taka's mood as they passed through an overgrown graveyard, early morning twilight suppressing colours into greyscale. The names on the skewed and tumbled stones had been worn away by the elements. The neglect irkedSasuke; as if those who had said their goodbyes to the dead had forgotten. Did men need to stop dying to be remembered? He paused to lay his hand against the cold of one of the stones and Sasuke's mind turned to other graves . . .

A frog, fresh after a winter's sleep, suddenly leapt up and down beside Sasuke's hand on the gravestone. Startled from his reverie, Sasuke looked around him and saw that the sun was rising. A ghost of a smile appeared on his face and he reached out his hand at one of the overhanging trees, bending with spring blossoms. Sasuke had company that day as his team walked back to their base. It wasn't a moment that could die; no goodbyes had to be said.

* * *

**Thanks for reading! If you liked it, I encourage you to read my in-progress story "If You Should Go". Let me know what you think! And if you feel so inclined, you can vote for my entry on the SasuSaku FC on Naruto Forums (before Mar 31st).**


	2. Sequel chapter: Meet me on the equinox

Kakashi crossed his arms and faced his former students: "Gaara briefed me about what happened at the kage summit. In short, Madara seeks a stone tablet which lays somewhere beneath Konoha and our first priority is to recover it."

Naruto frowned in concentration. "Would it even still be there since the village was destroyed?"

Kakashi sighed. "I don't know. The logical place to start is the Uchiha quarter. Since it was on the outskirts, it was razed to the ground but I think the foundations may have remained intact. We'll check and hope that if it's not there that Madara never got to read it at the level he wished."

The conversation turned to other matters. Feigning attention to the discussion, Sakura lowered her defences against the memory and she looked away, up to the sky in thought.

**

The seasons were turning and soon it would be the first winter since she had started tending the Uchiha graveyard. Excepting missions, she had managed to come here every day and today was no different. Even if the visits were brief sometimes, sandwiched between Tsunade-sama's errands, when all she had time for was pulling a few weeds, it had added up – the graveyard was still disused but it was no longer in disrepair. Sakura hadn't told anyone about her work here. It was too personal, this visceral satisfaction of accomplishing a physical task. She was loathe to have it known; this something she could do for him.

Before it snowed she would need to find an axe of some sort to deal with dead branches from the fall. The self-imposed secrecy over her work precluded the risk of bringing one from the main part of the village so she would have to make do with what she could find close at hand.

Despite tending the area for months, Sakura hadn't ventured into any of the buildings. Not that she was scared. . .just… that it felt too soon. Better to prove her merit to any ghosts within by respecting the dead without. The buildings of the Uchiha quarter, like the rest of Konoha, were heaped shoulder-to-shoulder with no spare space for outdoor storage like tool sheds. It stood to reason then that any tools would be in the basement of one of these houses.

She would start with his house.

The front door was unlocked and Sakura left it open behind her to let fresh air in. The stale air of the house gave the rooms a smothered aura yet, just like the graveyard when she first found it, it wasn't as if no one had taken care of the house in the last ten years. . .it certainly wasn't in such disarray as to suggest that only the cadavers had disappeared. Sakura's regular visits to the Uchiha quarter confirmed that she was the only one in the village to venture this way so it wasn't a surprise to see the dust-covered interiors…still… why hadn't anyone come? Usually Konoha went to great lengths to take care of its own, like how apartments were set up for Sasuke and Naruto…

Hn. This was Sasuke. He had probably insisted on taking care of it himself. Fiercely determined as he was (and still is, murmured her inner self), Sakura could easily see how the villagers would at first hesitate and hover, checking on him. Over time, as he yet again proved himself mature and capable beyond his years, they stopped coming and in time, forgot.

As was often the case, her time was limited time today. Taming her curiosity with the mental reprimand that the upper rooms would be explored another day, Sakura went straight to the basement. Which proved to be. . . ordinary. Sakura wasn't quite sure what she was expecting, but a well-organized storage room with tools hanging in their designated spaces and neat rows of tins on shelves and squeeze tubes of pastes for home renovation just seemed so….normal. Though, to some degree, she was surprised everything still held together after all these years.

A woodsman's axe hung below a shelf. As she was shuffling back to stand up without bashing her head, she bumped storage shelving, jolting a shelf loose. Paint cans bounded down, bursting open upon the stone floor, sloshing paint across the room.

Huh. Well. That's the answer there. Sakura watched the paint spread, slowing her pounding heart. The paint ran the geometrical patterns of the rivets between the floor's masonry, blue and red intermingling and….disappearing? At one flagstone's edge, the paint was pouring down.

Charging chakra into her hands and through her axe she pried the stone away (setting it carefully to one side so she wouldn't knock anything more over) and tentatively shone chakra light down the hole – a passageway!

Several minutes after beginning tracing the winding paths of 'what lay beneath the beneath', her progress came to a halt before an improvised stone wall. Sakura raised a hand against it. The mortar was weak as if it had been done in haste and the stones looked like they might have come from the passageway itself. A strong chakra signature emanated from beyond the other side; disturbing because of its unexpectedness.

Summoning Katsuyu in one of her miniature forms, Sakura sent her through one of the larger gaps in the crumbly mortar to scout.

Katsuyu's small voice soon called back through to Sakura: "It's a room with no doors; no one's here."

"Can you use your tongue tooth sticky acid to wear away the mortar?"

"Of course. I'll also reinforce your entranceway"

"Thank you very much." Sakura smiled gratefully; Katsuyu had intuitively discerned the plan, again living up to Tsunade's praise of being the brightest of the three sannin summons. Rather than break something unnecessarily (since she had already done that in the basement), she would remove and replace the stones. The mortar would still be missing, but with her rapidly diminishing time, filling that back in would have to wait for another visit. A vacant room at the end of a hidden passageway in a vacant quarter of town likely did not receive many visitors.

In short order Sakura crawled through a hole rimmed with neutralizing coagulant slime to arrive in a room that must have had few purposes; the murals made it clear that she was still in Uchiha territory. Definitely an invitation-only space. Chakra-cycling perpetual fire torches lit paralleled frescoes of crossed sabres, flames and a strange silhouetted figure holding objects she couldn't understand. The focal point of this ceremony was framed a stone tablet. Engraved with symbols that might have been letters if only her eyes could make ordered. That the script was linear was clear yet the letters blurred to mere symbols. . .

"Sakura!"

Wooden-paneled walls buckling; stone frame melted away; Katsuyu's band of coagulant bent inward under the weight of earth and stone; the whole room was collapsing! Sakura seized the tablet – if it was important enough to the Uchihas to have its own room, it was important enough to save. Chucking it through the hole, she scrambled after it. Safely out, Sakura dismissed Katsuyu before the improvised entrance collapsed on the slug.

When the dust settled, barely visible from under the rubble, corroded residue of what must have been one of the stones shone iridescent. Some of the sticky acid must have escaped neutralizing.

Sakura plunked herself down on the ground; heart racing a second time. Gotta stop breaking the place. The weighty tablet pulled at her attention. Uchiha relic or no, keeping it in the Uchiha quarter would be risky if the houses were unlocked. Her room was out of the question – a three-foot stone slab wouldn't go unnoticed. Sakura ran her hand along the stone's thick edge. It had been in good condition for having been left to its own devices; self-sustaining light…

Mm. She knew just where to keep it. A greenhouse closer to the edge of Fire country lands than to Konoha kept a stock of live titan arum, the pollen of which was mixed in extreme soldier pills like Choji's red pepper pill. Sakura knew of it from having attended with Tsunade and Shizune to scrape fresh pollen when the flowers bloomed last year. The greenhouse was kept far away and was generally avoided for the reason that the self-sufficient flowers needed no tending, only bloomed once every six years, and rank of cadaver when they did so. She was slated to do the greenhouse circuit run tonight anyhow; a short detour wouldn't hurt…

**

Now approaching midnight, Sakura slipped out the disused Uchiha gate to Konoha. The tablet hadn't been able to fit entirely in her pack and so stuck up like a samurai's sashimono. Crisp mid-autumn breeze questioned her decision to go without a cloak. No matter – Sakura loved this kind of evening; it smelled of burnt leaves and adventure. The starlight was enough to make up for the waning crescent moon. She set off at an easy lope into the forest.

**

At the half-way point, near the remnants of the former Land of Mountains, the moon hadn't yet crested the third peak in the distance. If she was making such good time, then she could pause a while to enjoy the night. Beyond the tree line, a table of rock jutted above a field filled with shoulder-tall buckwheat awaiting harvest. Mounting the rock brought her within the path of the autumn wind and it pulled her gaze across the waving crop to the field of stars above her.

Easing the pack from her shoulders, Sakura laid the stone tablet in front of her, kneeling close to resume her examination of it. How could something carved in stone be so mutable? What strange markings—

!

Undergripped for quickness, Sakura's green kunai met blade to blade with a katana closing diagonally toward her neck. A shinobi stood behind her; male, given the strength with which the sword responded to her block.

"Sakura."

She looked up, agape. It was him.

Both shinobi held their ground, locked in the frozen moment of waiting for the other to make the next move. . .until Sasuke abruptly yielded his attack, sheathing his katana with flawless iaido. He tilted his head nonchalantly so his gaze fell past Sakura to the stone tablet below. "Where'd you get that?"

Clearly, he knew what this tablet was. But his voice was neutral, even having a note of curiosity within it that somewhat assuaged Sakura's fears that he would react with displeasure upon finding out that she had been rummaging around Uchiha property and taking things. If he yielded so easily, then he wasn't out for her blood. Still, warily sheathing her kunai, she felt anxious to explain, "I was looking for a nearby axe—

Sasuke crouched beside where she knelt (What was he even doing so close to Konoha?),

"—to cut the dead branches—

reaching across her for the tablet, the edge of his sleeve brushing her thigh…

"—from trees hanging over—

He traced the lines of script lightly with his hands (How could he be so casual? He had drawn his sword against her not a minute ago!)

"—the graves I've been taking care of—

Having confirmed something, Sasuke's manner became intent as he sharinganed and read (Could he understand what was written there?)

"—and the closest houses were—

Sasuke mangekyo sharinganed and read (His eyes are…different now…they're flowers)

"—Uchiha ones because that's the graveyard—

Sasuke stopped reading and looked at her incisively, the full weight of his sudden scrutiny turning her tongue to lead.

"You've been tending their graves?" he inquired softly.

Sakura nodded a little in affirmation. All the things she wanted to ask him; the important questions about why he was a ronin, what he wanted now…faded just a little…because he was beside her now and knew this secret.

Sasuke's mouth relaxed into a bittersweet smile. "Sakura . . ."

But his eyes flickered and he was staring beyond her, his gaze hardening into a formidable glare. She turned to see what he was looking at. Only night and field to the tree line. "Sasuke, what do you see?"

"Run."

"What?!" Sakura exclaimed, startled into glancing back at Sasuke for clarification.

His mangekyo sharingan remained fixated at the field beyond her as he redrew his sword. "Take the tablet and run".

Warily, Sakura scanned the field again. Still nothing.

"You're not safe here."

She froze. She could feel his closeness behind her; his breath reaching the back of her neck. She turned her head halfway back over her shoulder. His presence made intimate by proximity; it bespoke of the potential for his touch. She bit her lip. Damn him! Sexy bastard. She wasn't done with him! She could own whatever danger he saw!

Grabbing the open edge of his shirt, Sakura turned to face him and tell him as much – and found herself unexpectedly very, very close to his face. Sasuke was on his knees now too and the fabric of their clothes touched knee to chest, pressing back to the skin here and there. If he had raised his arms, she would have been within them. Surprise loosened Sakura's grip. Looking up, his haunted eyes met hers. Her will crumpled. She wanted to touch his face so badly, to cup his cheek that he might lean into her hand, closing his eyes because of the peace it brought him.

But he wanted her to go and her hand stopped short from touching. A moment, it hovered. . .and dropped.

She stashed the tablet back her pack, and paused, looking at him one. last. time. . .Sasuke's look acknowledged that they had unfinished business between them.

Sakura tore across the field.

**

A patch just above the grass line increasingly shimmered. Sasuke hadn't had the opportunity to use mangekyo sharingan before when this was happening. Shimmer to ripple to whirl to Madara swirling, frowning as he stood before Sasuke.

**

Sakura dashed through the woods, branches scratching and heart aching.

That we would meet tonight. . .under the same sky.

* * *

**A/N: Much to my surprise, I seem to have written a sequel chapter to my earlier drabble, "In a Disused Graveyard":**

**The SasuSaku FC on NarutoForums is having a fan art contest and I wanted to enter something, but before I draw I needed an idea so I 'sketched' this out.**

**If you're wondering about the timeline for events, I've pegged the main action of this story roughly between when Sasuke associates with Madara and the destruction of Konoha.**

**My next chapter of my other story, "If You Should Go", is in progress and I expect it'll be done in a month or so (exams T^T).**

** Most of all, thanks for reading! If you'd like to drop me a note or a comment about the story, I encourage you to!**


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